What does it mean to be at home?
Our loftiest ideals intersect with the messiest realities of being human in the places we call home. They are sites of aspiration and love, contestation and conflict. Homes are vital projects into which we invest our deepest desires and anxieties. They manifest the ways in which we see the world and our place within it.
"Human beings belong to the world in such a way that we make the world belong to us. To be human is to be a co-creator with God in the consummation of an as yet unfinished world: we are not only habitat-occupier but also home-builders. [...] The kinds of home-building that humans engage in are radically different from the genetically-programmed nest-building that can be observed elsewhere in the animal kingdom."
Why Aquinas Matters Now, p. 97
Homelessness is pandemic. Not only those who have nowhere to call home but those who feel deracinated, adrift, and those whose fragile sense of belonging erupts in rhetorical, political or physical violence. We are more aware than ever of the environmental emergency that threatens to engulf our common home and the home we bequeath to successive generations.
But what do we mean? Is the home a place, a space, a disposition, an illusion, an existential question? Does the task of being human impose upon us the burden of building a home or of reconciling ourselves to a deeper ontological (or even theological) homelessness that we endlessly try to elude?
The homeplace project is a set of theological and philosophical experiments in belonging. Its central work is a focussed investigation of the human homing instinct, in the conviction that our attempts at home-building reveal something of the mystery of being human and of belonging to a world that has its ultimate home in God.